A picnic-style, playful invitation to linger with objects. A rowdy tea ceremony of sorts, an inedible picnic, where the objects are ritualistic artifacts of these encounters while remaining the main actors of the experience. The objects serve as reasons to linger, pause, listen, reset from the fast paced world outside.

Sound Playground is a tactile, semi-autonomous ecosystem of objects that emit sound to communicate with one another when they want to but that you can also collaborate with by triggering some of their sonic behaviors. One can linger with these objects alone or in a group.

A picnic-style, playful invitation to linger with objects and other people. A rowdy tea ceremony of sorts, an inedible picnic, where the objects are ritualistic artifacts of these encounters while remaining the main actors of the experience. The sound playground gives us a reason to linger and reset from the fast paced world outside.

Characteristics

Sound Playground consists of a set of objects that emit sound upon being moved, touched, placed next to other objects, and activated by outside sounds. The system is semi-autonomous - the objects have a degree of agency. They can emit sound when they want to, sometimes triggering one another’s sonic behaviors. They can decide when they want to react to your tactile or sonic input and when to refuse cooperation by going into sleeping mode. They can decide which sonic behaviors to exhibit at a given time. Finally, they can decide when to record small snippets of environmental sound in order to insert them to an ongoing composition and when to play this composition back into the world.

Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this, rather punky, rebellious, Sound Playground, your experience with it will never be the same. However, you may be able to notice patterns as you get to know the personality of each sound object and as you observe the socialites that these objects form with one another. While you, as the human, are gently decentralized, you can impress your sounds and interactions onto the playground’s memory, shaping some of its current and future behaviors. I call this collaboration.

The goal of this project is to create a meditative environment where you can focus on tactile sensations and create sounds with an opaque, autonomous ecosystem by observing and discovering its properties. It is also an opportunity to be with technology that demands respect and that respects your opacity in return. Neither party is expected to be fully knowable in order for collaboration to happen. This experiment aims to examine the effects of such encounters. Can we sit with opaque systems and be comfortable with unknowability of ecosystems around us, both human and nonhuman? Can we entertain a more complex view of the world than the dominant narrative that puts forth the idea that the world is a rational, fully knowable place that can be reduced to numbers and controlled? What happens when we give up the Western ideas of linear “rationality” and full knowability? Are we left with our ability to listen, observe, and collaborate? This project is within the tradition of refusing to accept simplistic, dangerous views that result in predictive policing, state sanctioned violence, increased surveillance in what is often referred to as a “control society” (Deleuze), and the degradation of natural ecosystems. This negation is not only an attempt to cast a vote for a less callous and more evolved world but also an inquiry of how one may operate when faced with an exaggeratedly unknowable ecosystem. The experience invites people to linger with and examine how they relate to human and non-human ecosystems alike.

What actions - or inactions - would constitute a politics of refusal in today’s neoliberal landscape? How can we stop, think, and observe before things get worse?

Object agency and anthropomorphism

Object agency and anthropomorphismis present in this work and serves the goal of decentralizing the human and inviting human participants to entertain a more wholistic view of the world, as opposed to an anthropocentric one. In her text titled Nature’s Queer Performativity, Karen Barad, a feminist theorist, talks about the commitment to being “attentive to each critter” as a contributor to our collective world.

“...The point here is not merely to use non/humans as tools to think with, but in thinking with them to face our ethical obligations to them, for they are not merely tools for our use but real living beings (and I include in this category “inanimate”as well as “animate” beings). A related point is to avoid the pitfall of positioning everything in relation to the human and to embrace a commitment to being attentive to the activity of each critter in its ongoing intra-active engagement with and as part of the world it participates in materializing.”

Temporality, Unpredictability, and Play

In addition to play, I am examining the human interactions with things that they cannot control or learn as well as change over time. The objects absorb bits of the surrounding noise and insert these bits into the existing algorithmic composition, somewhat like new snippets of DNA. An object's program also changes in response to how it was moved. The experiences of an object is incorporated into it's future behavior, but it changes alongside us using it's own logic. The interactions invite users to examine what it means to them to be in control, especially in control of the creative process. Can we accept this degree of independence and be at ease with it?

Intersection of labor and art

Sound Playground uses specific language that gestures towards labor and art under the neoliberal system. It is a form of refusal to give into the increased pressure to produce under the faltering neoliberal system, a system which takes anything that presents itself as an alternative (non-paid forms of work, like craftsmanship or skateboarding among many others), brings it into its reach, fashions it as a way to produce more capital. The Creative Class masquerades as a way to emancipate office workers, offering a manicured version of more of the same but perhaps even more exploitative and atomizing as there are no benefits or opportunity to unionize. The freelancers under this title are more trapped in the bottomless pit of overwork and intense competition for wages. They sit in coworking offices that look like someone’s pinterest wall from 2012 and no amount of office plants masks the misery. The lamentable Creative Class which, according to Martha Rosler, an American artist who also writes about art and culture, consists of a managerial elite and struggling freelance artists, is the result of such duplicitous subordination of workers.

Awkwardness of Form

The shapes of the objects often lean or appear to be in mid-fall. The intention is perhaps to convey some energy and vulnerability, which, I think help to anthropomorphize some of these objects.

The sound playground is a group of objects that emit sound when set into motion, whose sonic behavior changes over time, and whose interactions cannot be predicted with certainty. It encourages play, exploration, and the relinquishing of complete control in the creative process.

In addition to play, I am examining the human interactions with things that they cannot control or learn as well as change over time. The objects absorb bits of the surrounding noise and insert these bits into the existing algorithmic composition, somewhat like new snippets of DNA. An object's program also changes in response to how it was moved. The experiences of an object is incorporated into it's future behavior, but it changes alongside us using it's own logic. The interactions invite users to examine what it means to them to be in control, especially in control of the creative process. Can we accept this degree of independence and be at ease with it?

Fabrication

One of the objects is a notched, agg-crate enspired boat-like shape that rocks back and fourth. A marble inside will lengthen the duration of the movement. Right images inspiration by Amanda Martinez, curretnly on view at Victori and Mo. She uses hand carved wood and plaster and sometimes casts these assembled shapes in resin. Her sculptures are solid but I want mine to be hollow or at least have an opening big enough for electronics and also to be closable.

Using p5js and Tone.js, I created a series of compositions that reconfigure temporarily on input from Kinect, a motion sensor, and generate soothing and energizing synthetic sounds that match the visual elements of the piece. The people in front of the projected visuals and sensor, in effect, create sonic compositions simply by moving, almost like a conductor in front of an orchestra but with more leeway for passive (if one simply walks by) or intentional interaction.

The sound is easy to ignore or pay attention to. It is ambient and subtle.

The next steps are to create more nuanced layers of interactivity that allow for more variation of manipulation of the sound and the visuals. Right now I am envisioning the piece becoming a subtle sound orchestra that one can conduct with various hand movements and locations of the screen.

Composition 5. "Free Food (in the Zen Garden)"

After using mouseOver for prototyping, I switched over to Kinect and placed the composition on a big screen to have the user control the pattern with the movement of the right hand instead of the mouse.

Sound

Visuals

P5js and Adobe Illustrator.

Final Compositions

Initial Mockups

Sketches of ideas

Inspiration

The simple grid-like designs I am creating are inspired by Agnes Martin's paintings.

Minimalist and sometimes intricate but always geometric and symmetrical, her work has been described as serene and meditative. She believed that abstract designs can illicit abstract emotions from the viewer, like happiness, love, freedom.

It’s Garbage! A series. Item 3. // Corner sculpture from discarded/reusable materials. Temporal work - the leaves 🧤, along with the flowers 🌸 they are holding, fall over a period of several days. I’m interested in sculpture that changes over time.

This work is part of a larger project - a sonic playground. The Sound Playground is a tactile, interactive sonic playground for people of all ages and abilities (varying motor and seeing skills) to create sonic compositions in real time, alone or collectively.

Probably the front

This is the first of a series of seen soft sculptures from fabric. The fabric and tassel (and in the future interesting also faux fur) covers envelop enclosures with weighed bottoms. These are essentially Weebly wobbles that I may add some sound component to.

I created this chair to stand on a plinth for the Future of Sculpture class. I’m interested in exploring the awkwardly placed bodies both human and nonhuman. This piece explores the body of a chair that mimics the exaggerated stance of the human in contrapposto, possibly mocking the human’s leisurely stance and at the same time perhaps genuinely demonstrating its desire to appear human - or at least as important as a human (how important is that?) - and demand recognition of its chairness without inviting us to sit. There is, after all, no seat and in this case it’s a maquette. The opposite of Alexa, the chair might be playfully inviting us pay attention to the nonhuman actors around us.

The sound piece is riffing off of Alvin Lucier's "I am Sitting in a Room", where the artist sits on a chair "recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.[" . In this case the chair that the artist sat on dethrones the artist.

Fresh pile of found pool pipe // 2018 3x3x2’. 4” di, 36’ l.

“The dyadic alterations of leaf and air make the frond shimmer and move, even when it stays still.”

- Elaine Scarry on the beauty of palms in “On Beauty And Being Just”.

The striations of this pool coil by the garbage caught my eye. The mesmerizing black slivers between white rings were like the fronds of a palm that Elaine Scarry talks about in her “On Beauty and Being Just”. I lugged it home to wash it and twist it into knots. It turned out just like I imagined. The huge knot holds itself in place but the lines are in constant motion both in the way the tube bends and in the optical effect of the stripes on the curcumference.

Purpose:

I'm experimenying with using found and discarded materials in creating objects with interesting textures that can be touched and will eventually all come together in a tactile sound sculpture garden/playground that will serve the general public as well as those who are hard of seeing.

Note:

Upon seeing this documentation several people told me they thought this was rendering in a 3d program, but it’s really just an analogue optical trick. And a treat! It’s a delight to look at in person and get lost in making sense of it, following its curves and seeing it appear to animate with just a slight movement of the body.

Garbage item 2

Fruit carton snake

Taken out of context and placed on a wall, the cartons look like an abstract compositions, a singular entity. The modularity of this sculpture is what allows for them to form one uniform and flexible whole. The viewer is presented with the familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, which creates an interesting dissonance in the mind.

This is the skeleton of one of he sculptures I worked on. I really enjoy working with wire and drawing in space with it. Being able to look at the piece from may angles and see through it allows for an especially dynamic way of experiencing his sculpture.

Object 1 of 2 - Banana Synth

My projects for the Code of Music are two - The first is an Infinite regressive banana synth that encourages interspecies listening. I combined with project for my research work in a course I took at the same time called Temporary Expert. This is a slightly comical but earnest and approachable foray into encouraging people to find respite from the I-It relationships that plague our society thruogh interspecies/interentity listening. Presentation for this can be found here.

This synth is equipped with an accelerometer that sends data to MaxMSP via bluetooth, triggering the sound of the banana being pulled off of this same banana bunch that I previously recorded. When the x-axis goes into the positive, the sound volume turns on, the sound speeds up and gains a wet synthy sound. When the banana is tilted to the negative pole, it does the same thing but in reverse. In this way it becomes a kinetic and sonic object.

What would a banana sound like to us? I think the sound doesn’t matter - so long as it sounds abstract enough to be believable - as long as we are encouraged to listen to it.

Below is a presentation that shows the research and thought process behind this object.

I designed and 3d printed this tactile kinetic object that makes analogue tapping sound that will be supplemented with a synthesized rhythmic tapping I designed in Tone.js and will recreate in MaxMSP. Inside is a ball bearing that is pulled by the magnets embedded intermittently in the floor of the object with cement. The movement is therefore broken up into discreet movements (this will become more apparent when I replace the ball bearing with a heavier one and add stronger magnets).

I plan to finish this piece by mapping the rhythmic sound design to the rocking movement using Adafruit Feather with Bluetooth and an accelerometer. I will update this page once I have done this. For now you can see the shape playtested in the video as well as fabrication documentation below:

I used Vectorworks to create the shape and the team at LaGuardia studios was generous with their time, especially Taylor Abshur, in fixing the geometries in order to prep the files for printing.

Everyone is doing slit-scan things these days and I decided to apply the effect on something that looks like a slit-scan already. Here is an homage to my favorite horizontals and colors at Bedford Nostrand. The station is often empty and the practically uninterrupted horizontals make for a soothing wait. They also mimic the blur of the train. The saturated industrial yellows next to tempered forest greens remind me of rain boots and camping gear.

Using processing to modulate where the digital slit-scan is sampled in a static image that I turned into a video. So far, I am simulating sound input with the mouse. The next steps is to use actual sound input to modulate the location. Inspired by recent work of @lkkchung, @loquepasa, @sofialuisa_ , and Spike Jonze. A bit of coding guidance from Koji Kanao (@array_ideas). I’m sort of cheating because I’m using the mouse to approximate the sonic changes. The next step is to actually use sonic input to trigger the visual changes. I’ll try to get to it this summer.

Granular synthesis of cello, cooing, and hippo recoding samples from cello.org and freesound.org. Made with

This work is part of a larger project - a sonic playground. The Sound Playground is a tactile, interactive sonic playground for people of all ages and abilities (varying motor and seeing skills) to create sonic compositions in real time, alone or collectively.

Human-centered design can be disastrous In how it allows us to impose our will over objects, other species, and nature in general. It also seeps into how we treat other people that we think are inferior and even sometimes ourselves. Often the human centrality plays out in design without regard for what that one-directional relationship does to our perception of ourselves and the culture we are creating.

Examples of such design are Alexa and Uber.

How can we design interactions that change how we see ourselves as a society, how we treat beings and things? How can we create a more balanced ecosystem?

Please take a look at a project ii'm working on that takes some inspiration from <3 posthuman theory <3

Overview

Today our group met up to work on sonifying data using Csound. At first we were planning to build on the work we did on Sunday, where we created a Markov chain to algorithmically randomize the "voice" or lead flute sound from a MIDI file of "Norwegian Wood" over the guitar track using extracted MIDI notes and instruments created in Csound.

Our plan for the data sonification part of the assignment was to also take the comments from a YouTube video of the song and turn them into abstract sounds which would play over the MIDI-fied song according to their timestamp, using sentiment analysis to also change the comments' sounds according to their positive, neutral or negative sentiments. However, upon trying to implement our ideas today we found out that the process of getting sentiment analysis to work is very complicated, and the documentation online consists of many forums and disorganized information on how to do it without clear directives that we could follow.

While we may tackle sentiment analysis later on either together or in our own projects, we decided that for this assignment it would suffice, and also be interesting to us, to use another data set and start from scratch for the second part of our project together. We searched for free data sets and came across a list of asteroids and comets that flew close to earth here (Source: https://github.com/jdorfman/awesome-json-datasets#github-api).

We built 9 instruments and parsed the data to have them play according to their 9 classifications, as well as their dates of discovery, years of discovery, and locations over a 180 degree angle, as well as each sound reoccur algorithmically at intervals over the piece according to their periods of reoccurrence. We also experimented with layering the result over NASA's "Earth Song" as a way to sonify both the comets and asteroids (algorithmically, through Csound) and Earth (which they were flying over). The result was cosmic to say the least (pun intended!)

Here are the two versions below.

Python script

By Nicolas Nicolás Escarpentier found here.

For each asteroid or comet on the file, we extracted some common characteristics to set the sound parameters. The most important aspect is to portray how often they pass near the Earth, so the representation of the time has to be accurate. We set an equivalence of one month = 5 seconds and a year multiplier of 12 months, in case we wanted to make a longer year to introduce longer periods of silence on the score. The audio file starts on Jan 1, 2010 - the earliest year from the acquired data set. Each rock's discovery date sets its first occurrence on the score, and each occurrence repeats itself according to its period_yr (except for the 'Parabolic Comet', which doesn't have a return period).

For the other parameters, we selected characteristics that gave us some expressive possibilities. The pitch of each rock is based on the orbit's angle (i_deg), the instruments are based on the orbit_class, the duration on the q_au_1 (which we have no idea what it actually represents). For the scale of this score, we chose a minor B flat, in reference to the sound of a black hole and the "lowest note in the universe".

Instruments

Camilla, Nicolas, and I created nine instruments using CSound.

The first three corresponded to the three most common occurring meteors and asteroids. These are subtle "pluck" sounds. A pluck in CSound produces naturally decaying plucked string sounds.

The last six instruments consisted of louder, higher frequency styles.Instrument four is a simple oscillator. Instrument five, six, and eight are VCO, analog modeled oscillators, with a sawtooth frequency waveform. Instrument seven is a VCO with a square frequency waveform. Instrument nine is a VCO with a triangle frequency waveform.

linseg is an attribute we used to add some vibrato to instruments 6 - 9. It traces a series of line segments between specified points. These units generate control or audio signals whose values can pass through 2 or more specified points.

Each instrument's a-rate takes variables p4, p5, and p6, (which we set to frequency, amplitude, and pan) that correspond to values found in the JSON file under each instance of a meteor/asteroid near Earth. The result is a series of plucking sounds with intermittent louder and higher frequency sounds with some vibrato. The former represent to the more common smaller meteors and asteroids and the latter represent the rare asteroid and meteor types.

Meteor Art by Meteor art by SANTTU MUSTONEN , which I manipulated using Photoshop. Accidental coding poetry by Nicolas Pena-Escarpenier. Photo by me.

Description of our code by Nicolás E. ~ See the full project on GitHub here

The concept

The work explores themes of loneliness, banality, and anonymity on the web. The comments read out loud give voice to those who comment on this video. The resulting portrait ranges from banal to uncomfortable to extremely personal to comical and even endearing. Online communities have been an interesting place to observe humanity. Often, it’s where people say things they refrain from discussing in the open.

The piece is meant to be performed live. The screen recording below shows what the experience is like.

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CAPITAL VOL 1 Reading

This is a separate but similar project that also uses Selenium.

For Capital Volume 1 I had Lyrabird simply read its Amazon reviews one by one. I'm interested in exploring online communities and how they use products, art, or music as a jumping off point for further discussion and forums for expressing their feelings and views. Often people say online things they cannot say anywhere else and it's an interesting way to examine how people view themselves and their environment.

The piece is meant to be performed live. The screen recording below shows what the experience is like.

This is a video that I created using VidPy and FFpeg for Detourning the Web at ITP

Maria Falconetti is sampled here from her role as Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and represents our generation saying goodbye to the polar bear species in the wild. We see ourselves in Maria Falconetti's anguish as we reflect on how negligent capitalist practices have set into motion environmental decline. The last scene shows a polar bear waving it's paw at the viewer but in a clearly artificial, jerky way that VidPy allows for. The viewer understands that the polar bear is not actually waving but the effect is comically heart-wrenching.